Faith in Action column: Boston still struggles with its racial past

Boston is a “city of champions.” The appellation is not only about its dominance in sports. It’s about Boston being one of the country’s leading medical and academic hubs, too.

Boston still prides itself as a “city upon a hill,” and it’s noted for a lot of firsts — i.e., public school (Boston Latin, 1635); Baseball World Series (Red Sox vs. Pirates, 1903); organ transplant (1954); same-sex marriage (2004); and its crown jewel, the Boston Marathon (1897).

Boston’s educational hub and its rich African-American heritage are what drew me here.

During the 1800s, Boston was the best city to be black in America. It was the epicenter of the country’s abolitionist movement, playing a major role in the Underground Railroad. And it had the largest free African-American population in the country. Most of these residents lived on the North Slope of Beacon Hill, where now placards commemorating the neighborhood’s luminaries dot the streets I walk today to attend functions at the African American Museum, the country’s first.

Boston, lauded as one of the bluest states in the country, with an activist court that has always been forward thinking, I thought would be one of the better cities for minorities like myself — LGBTQ, people of color, women — to call its second home.

But I quickly learned Boston has an inglorious history, too.

So, when comedian Michael Che joked during a pre-Super Bowl “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live that Boston is “the most racist city I’ve ever been to,” Che had no idea that he hit the city’s third rail. Nearly two months later and during an appearance at Boston University, his controversial statement still simmered for many Bostonians, receiving criticism both from his audience and on social media when he refused to recant or apologize.

Looking at Boston’s racial history through the lens of public school education, one can easily see an area of its troubling past still present today.

A past event indelibly etched in people’s memory — here and abroad — is Stanley Forman’s infamous 1976 photo titled “The Soiling of Old Glory.” It shows a young, white male attacking an African-American man using the pointy end of a flagpole as a spear, with the American flag attached at City Hall Plaza. The photograph went viral, revealing to the shock of the world Boston’s busing crisis. It placed the city on the map as one of “the racist” for hiding under its “liberal facade” yet being one of the last holdouts to desegregate its schools after the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954.

For some, Boston’s busing crisis is the city’s old past. South Boston, which was front and center in the battle, is no longer that close-knit old school “tough-as-nails” Irish Catholic enclave. “Southie,” as it is still fondly referred to, today flaunts some of the best restaurants and expensive housing in the city. But the historical memory of that horrific era still lingers because, in my opinion, stereotypes about class makes it easier to point the pox of racism at Southie, a hardscrabble community, than at liberal Cambridge, where I reside, or at a tony suburb, like Wellesley, where I attended undergrad.

Rather than address the challenge to provide educational parity for all of Boston’s school-aged children, Boston’s white and less financially strapped populations, like that of South Boston in the 1970s, solved their neighborhood school desegregation crisis by fleeing to the suburbs, leaving a high concentration of its urban schools in both poverty and in disrepair.

While Boston doesn’t have a direct “school-to-prison pipeline” like many other major urban cities across the country, The Boston Globe reported that there is zero tolerance in Massachusetts when it comes to disciplining students of color, which leads to repeated arrests and then evidently incarceration. Massachusetts African-American school-aged children are disciplined, expelled and suspended four times more than white children, and Latino school-aged are three times as likely.

When the “no” votes won in November on Massachusetts ballot Question 2 to not raise the state cap on charter schools, I sighed, hoping there’ll be more focus on its inner-city schools. But when you have only two premier public schools — Boston Latin School, now an “exam school” that once only schooled the white sons of Boston’s “Brahmin” elite, and O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science — they become the city’s new battleground.

With today’s enrollment percentages of black and Latino students shamefully half that of two decades ago at BLS, it’s frightening for parents of children to color to send their children there. And students of color — past and present — tell of their travails.

Because many of Boston’s white ethnic populations won’t confront the civic history it dredges up for them, the anger it unleashes being asked to address their white privilege, and the angst of not knowing what to do, Boston’s racial past is not dead. It’s not even past.

Cambridge resident Rev. Irene Monroe is a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Monroe also does a weekly Monday segment called “All Rev’d Up” on WGBH, a Boston member station of National Public Radio.